Aurora 4x
Off Topic => Forum Issues => Topic started by: nuclearslurpee on June 08, 2025, 05:22:40 PM
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Hi all,
In the past few weeks or so, I've noticed that the connection to the forums seems slow and/or unstable. I am often seeing the "SMF not available" page, which usually appears when the forum is actually down, but in this case I can often get back to the forum by refreshing the page a few times. It comes up seemingly randomly.
I am curious if this is affecting others, if this is a known issue, and/or if the problem is on my end and there are some steps I can take to fix this. N.B., I am seeing the same behavior on multiple devices that I use to browse these fine forums, so I doubt it is due to a device-specific issue in this case.
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Just read your post and clicked on another thread to read from the home page. SMF not available page, multiple refreshes eventually worked.......
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Yes, I am seeing that sometimes too.
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Ironically, I just got that SMF error when I tried to click on this post. A refresh fixed it. So yes im seeing the same ha
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It has been happening to me as well in recent days.
Also loading posts and changing foruns as been slow.
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The intermittent nature of the problem definitely indicates a server-side issue.
Maybe there is a connection pool issue--some crusty old code not disposing of connections appropriately, perhaps?
Could be disk usage is being thrashed...though it seems that wouldn't be likely to give an immediate error response unless the problem has been bad for a long time.
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The problem is not happening now for some days.
Is it solved? What did it cause?
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The problem is not happening now for some days.
Is it solved? What did it cause?
I am still experiencing this issue, unfortunately.
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Yeah, still keeps happening.
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It was not presenting for some days to me, but now you are right and it is happening again. :(
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This site was not available for the last 2 days for me. Works at the moment.
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This problem gives me Deja vu. I run a forum built on SMF and host it on GoDaddy. I had very similar problems. It took awhile to figure out that it was due to a lack of a firewall that permitted AI bots to constantly attack the site. This activity would, over time, cause GoDaddy to throttle the site and it would eventually exceed capacity and force the site down. Paying a little more to add the extra security prevents the bot attacks and there have been no site outages since.
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Yeah, if it's anything like the other forums I'm familiar with running up against the same issues, it's time to place your faith in Anubis for protection (https://anubis.techaro.lol).
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Also this is 100% the "AI scraper bot" issue. Look at the bottom bar on the front page.
"Most Online Today: 10170. Most Online Ever: 17947 (June 05, 2025, 11:20:42 PM)"
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As of right now there's... "5321 Guests, 4 Users".
I think that makes it pretty clear what the issue is then, no?
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In that case, I would venture to say that this issue takes on urgency beyond the poor site performance. I'm not a big fan of the idea that AI bots are using my fiction posts to "learn" how to write marketing copy and slop mags. I'm sure it's not entirely preventable, but I'd appreciate an effort being made to curtail that.
Hopefully we can get some comment from Erik on this. If the answer involves a bump in hosting costs, I'd like to think we as a community can come together on this.
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Hopefully we can get some comment from Erik on this.
Erik said on discord he won't be able to do much for a while. IRL stuff.
I do notice there's a lot fewer guests reported today, and the forums are a lot better. Very odd.
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Hopefully we can get some comment from Erik on this.
Erik said on discord he won't be able to do much for a while. IRL stuff.
I do notice there's a lot fewer guests reported today, and the forums are a lot better. Very odd.
This would be expected if the problem is as I suspect. When the site goes down, the bot attacks temporarily stop, so function appears to return to normal. However, the attacks will start again resuming the cycle.
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I think what happens is that they restart the server once it becomes overloaded and the bot scrapers start back at nothing; once they climb up again down goes the server.
We're at 7000 guests and counting, so it should go down not too long after this message. Maybe an hour, tops? Assuming 10k is the max it can handle.
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more like the sql service crashes and is restarted.
I'm looking at ways to block bots/spiders
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Perhaps a tarpit thing? Something like Nepenthes or those Discord channels I see that are nothing but an insta-ban trap for bots.
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more like the sql service crashes and is restarted.
I'm looking at ways to block bots/spiders
The one that I usually see (and linked to earlier) is Anubis.